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A contribution to: Critiquing Criticism

Edited by Sophie Corser and Lucy Russell

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 10

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  This essay intends to investigate the role of the Restoration Poet Laureate, John Dryden, (1631-1700) in the emergence of literary criticism in the late seventeenth-century, and the extent to which he and his works were scrutinised by his libertine contemporaries. By examining the interconnecting literary spaces of Restoration London, this study will demonstrate how the city’s coffeehouses were associated with and utilised by a rising class of critics as a public platform for the distribution and consumption of criticism. Moreover, it will elucidate the way in which these coffeehouses were simultaneously viewed as a threat to the established forms of a libertine masculinity. This essay will discuss plays and poetry that scrutinised the literary critic, but were themselves the creative expression of critical perception. Such works include The Rehearsal (1671) by George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687), which is taken to caricature Dryden in its portrayal of the character Bayes, an unrefined conformist playwright preoccupied with his own fame. Other courtiers who formed a literary coterie with Buckingham, such as John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), championed the aristocratic judgement of art, and were opposed to the literary ideologies expressed by Dryden’s criticism and his social position. In the 1670s, shortly after Dryden’s appointment as Poet Laureate, this culminated in the lashing out of a libertine culture that had newly reinstated its dominance over literature and taste at the time of the Restoration in 1660.

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